Ashes
by Lalaofthealpacas
Summary: He was different now. He knew she could tell, and couldn't decide if this was good or not — couldn't decide anything, it seemed, when it came to Jane. (A very late Janther week 2018, Metanoia.)
1. A Beginning

Notes: This! is very VERY late! A year and 10ish months, which is classic but still horrible (like Chanel No5, if y'all have ever had the misfortune to smell that). But it's here, and though it's a little embarrassing, this is the longest thing I've ever managed to finish, so I'm trying to feel proud! I really missed writing and really missed JatD. It looks scary inactive out here recently, so I hope the fandom is just hibernating and not actually dead — but even if it is, I already wrote the damn thing, so I'm posting it anyways.

(I'd stick a bunch of hearts in these notes but I know from experience the sideways carrot portion is forbidden around here. Crossposted to Ao3 finally because this site apparently can't handle love. And also doesn't let you post its name, which I learned just now when that disappeared. Some p sick censorship levels, when you even censor yourself.)

Anyways — to be yelled into the void about weekly for the next five chapters. If you're out there, pls yell back!

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Chapter I.

A Beginning.

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I.

It's the same nightmare he's had before.

He's kneeling on the stone — of the chapel, of the throne room, of the steps to Jane's tower, of all of them at once.

He sees her hair hanging wild down to her knees. He doesn't dare raise his head any higher. The sword is cold on his shoulder. He can feel the chilled metal so close to his neck, and his pounding pulse.

Should I? she whispers.

This thing is nothing like Jane, and is more Jane than Jane herself has ever been. He knows it's not really her because he's afraid, feels it sharp beneath his chilled knees, threading thick through his breathless throat.

The thing that is Jane that isn't Jane waits for an answer. The metal could tap over to the other shoulder or bite into his neck, and in real life the king will decide whether or not to knight him, but in the dream it's always Jane.

Should I, she wonders again, and then he wakes up.

II.

Gunther eavesdropped all the time, and he always had.

Sometimes it was a precautionary measure. Sir Theodore, over the years, had almost bumped into a hundred and one reasons to rescind Gunther's apprenticeship, and Gunther had saved his skin by knowing about many of them ahead of time. He eavesdropped on the king too — very carefully, of course. (Though the king only rarely mentioned Gunther — which was somewhat disappointing, honestly, but was better than complaints. A king's complaints went further than anyone's).

Sometimes it was less precaution than ego. He liked knowing what people were saying about him. In a selfish, strange sort of way, it reminded him of his own existence, even when it was bad. (Certainly Gunther would rather be loved. Love stretched further than hate, gave more willingly. But hatred was a powerful thing still, and fear; fear even more so.)

Sometimes the listening was useless, or would seem so to most anyone else. But he listened anyways — because it was a habit, and one he was good at, and he liked doing things he was good at — and because he liked knowing. His father had said knowing was half of having once, and though Gunther knew having was the best of all, often just the knowing felt good enough. Sometimes there was a quiet feeling in his head of needing to do more, know more, be ready, and though he couldn't ever figure what exactly he needed to be ready for, damned if he was going to be caught unawares. He'd know exactly what he needed to know to keep himself safe, since no one else was going to bother. (His father had said once, leaning over thick fingers pressed against the desk in his study, towering over Gunther in size and personality and presence — it is us Breeches against the world, Gunther, never forget that.)

(Us Breeches against each other against the world, Gunther had amended in his head, even as he nodded.)

Often he forgot his eavesdropped conversations, providing they weren't useful. But there were a few he remembered oddly well. He had been fourteen for this one, maybe. (He figured that age because they'd been learning staves that day, and he and Jane had fought with more than just the padded weapons, his tongue still lightning hot with insults said and unsaid. They had learned how to hide those conversations more among pleasantries as they grew older under Sir Theodore's ever watchful eye.) He'd rounded the corner of the upper battlements, wiping dirty sweat from his forehead, and paused at the voices above him.

"Jane," Dragon was saying, "if Jingleboy and Sir Rustylegs were both dangling off the side of the cliff, and you could only grab one—"

"Ugh, Dragon. Not all of the princess's games are nice enough to repeat — and you know how I feel about this one." Jane had a tired sort of tone that she seldom used with Gunther. (He had no leeway in the progression of engaged to tired to irritated Jane; it usually went straight to irritated.) Despite her comparative emotional generosity with Dragon, there was still some potential she might get cross with him — a rare sight that Gunther found to be sort of satisfying on a petty, lonely level. He had pulled back into the corner below Jane's tower to listen.

"But why?" Dragon asked, not challenging, only confused and curious.

Jane gave an overloud sigh. "Because it is not about saving, it is about _choosing_."

"Are the choices really so hard? Then what about an easy one — the prince or princess. One you hate and one you love."

The conversation had turned very quickly to treason, which made it vastly more interesting to Gunther, who pressed back closer against the wall, quieting his exhales.

But of course Jane handily quashed the fun before it could even get started. Her voice turned high and shocked. "Dragon!"

"What? How is that not easy? I can tell you how nearly everyone in the castle would answer, if you need a hint."

"Dragon," she said in a much lower hiss, so that Gunther had to catch his breath to hear, "that is not _easy_. One of them is the crown prince, whom I have sworn my life to protect, and the other is someone who trusts me with her whole heart, to whom I have sworn the same, and both of them _are children_."

"Oh. Yes. Hmm." Dragon paused a bit sheepishly. "Well I can see where that gets difficult then. But it is not as if I am asking you to choose between your mother and father, it is only a bit of fun. What about if it was Gunther and—"

Jane interrupted the next bit, which Gunther had been very eager to hear. "Dragon, I just do not like choosing games like this. It would never happen in real life, and even if you choose one, who can know what you would really do, faced with such an awful decision?"

"I know."

Jane paused, sounding amused despite herself. "Well, O Great and Wise Dragon? What would you do?"

"Save both. See when you have wings _and_ arms — or legs, in my case—"

Jane laughed. "Cheat! I told you it is hard." Her voice then grew a wicked hint of tease, and Gunther noticed, wishing he hadn't, that it was a different, kinder sort of teasing than she used with him. "Alright, and if you had to choose between saving several people with your great many limbs or saving only one very crucial person, what then?"

"Is the person you? If it is, everyone else had better hope they learn to fly before they reach the bottom of the cliff—"

Jane had protested amongst smothered giggles, punctuated at the end with a snort. Gunther had drifted away, unable to keep a frown from his face.

He knew choosing was not something Jane was fond of. In the choice between her gender and her goals, she had chosen both; in the choice between her squirehood and Dragon, she had again chosen both. She had thrown her own dance instead of choosing between wearing a dress and not attending one at all. The list went on and on — and she wriggled out time and time again.

This was perhaps Gunther's least favorite of Jane's traits. Choices never worked out this way for him. There were always two, and one was awful, and the other usually was also awful, only in a slightly different way.

And maybe this was why he remembered this conversation strangely well amongst all that he'd heard. Gunther continued to think of it as the years passed without really understanding why. Dragon and Jane speaking with that lilting warmth, the parry back and forth of their conversation that so rarely turned sharp like his and Jane's, and Jane saying _I do not like choosing_ in almost as many words, as if it were the sort of thing anyone had the luxury to dislike.

III.

And at some point Gunther was eighteen, almost nineteen, almost knighted — and he still listened in on people, because it was a habit, and it was a precaution — and he was good at it.

He was leaning back against the wood wall of the knight's quarters where the structure met the castle stone ("Do you think Gunther moved in with the knights early because he was lonely in that great big house alone?" Pepper had asked Smithy a month ago, and Smithy had shrugged, and Gunther hearing from the wall above them had flinched). Between the sounds of metal and forge and shouting from beyond the stables, coming from the prince or princess or both, he heard the quiet murmur of Jane's voice.

It cut through everything. The sound of Jane trying, for once, to be quiet. (Or he'd always felt it had, but sometimes he wondered if that was only because he listened so much harder when it was Jane, and especially when it was Jane keeping secrets — and that made his heart burn with something that was embarrassment, or was thoughts he kept unthought for his own self-preservation.)

She wasn't quite whispering, but she very nearly was, Dragon's voice a low rumble beside hers. Of course it was Dragon she spoke with. Even now, they were inseparable. Jane would be knighted later than Gunther, for a little less than a year ago she and Dragon had left to search for something or other that had seemed so incredibly promising, that would surely lead them to any remaining dragons, and even if it took months wouldn't the king like to know if there was anything else as powerful as Dragon out there, any more of those lovely dragon swords—

(Jane was a fraud. She scammed the lot of them as much as his father ever had, but her scam was hope. She glowed with it, and believers fell before her like rain.)

They had come back with nothing to show for it. Apparently Gunther was the only one unsurprised by this. Jane had been gone for two seasons, and only now was she even starting to catch up to the training she'd missed.

And though Dragon had returned somehow quieter, less boisterous, still the two of them talked incessantly, and about everything. There was no guarantee they ever had anything interesting to say, but still Gunther tipped his head back against the wood and listened anyways. Because it was what he did, and because it was Jane. Because her voice was catching on the edges of her words, rounding their corners soft and unsure and unhappy.

"—seems different, does he not — not that I am _worried_… well, a little," she corrected, as if Dragon had given her a look. "Pepper says he never speaks to any of them anymore, and you have seen how—"

From the next yard over, the princess let loose an enraged scream (she was ten now and supposedly old enough to be acting proper, but the prince remained as he ever had, and siblings were siblings, royal or not), drowning out a few moments of Jane's conversation.

"—the _oddest_ patrols and always alone, and since when have we needed almost-knights to deliver messages to the outer villages—"

"Perhaps if you asked him instead of me, since I have no idea what goes on in his head—"

"But I have _tried_, Dragon, and he tells me nothing."

"If he tells you nothing, he wants to tell you nothing. I know it is difficult, Jane, but perhaps you should leave well enough alone."

Jane's silence sounded reluctant. Gunther thought the phrase 'leave well enough alone' was barely in her vocabulary.

"Give him time. And space."

Again Jane was silent. Then, "It must be so hard," with such feeling, swelling wider and louder than the few soft words.

Gunther closed his eyes and swallowed. So hard. Nothing was too hard for Jane.

There was a clatter of boots, and then the rush of wings. They were off, heavy wingbeats soaring up towards the clouds, but still Jane's voice echoed in his head, as solid as the stone wall beside him.

IV.

"I was about to take a walk. Care to join?"

Gunther looked up. Jane was standing in front of him, her hands on her hips and fisting a little into her tunic, belying her casual tone.

Gunther didn't stand. He looked back at the dagger he was polishing. "Where to?"

"Out." Jane threw a hand towards the forest. "You know."

"I really do not."

She huffed out a breath. "To check the woodland paths. I heard the northerly ones were damaged by the snow melt this year, so I thought I would take a look."

He raised his eyebrows. "On foot?"

She was quiet for a moment, and he looked up again, sure she was wrangling back an annoyed expression. Instead she was staring at her feet, her brows caught up together, curled around some worry. One hand left her hip to pinch long one of her orange curls. She tucked the strands back behind an ear when she saw his eyes on her. "Yes. On foot. The day is nice enough."

Nice enough was ungenerous. It was the warmest day of the year so far. Summer had truly arrived. He stood, stretching and sticking the dagger back in his boot.

"Good," Jane said, turning towards the forest. Though she hid it well, he could still hear the relief in her voice. She would grow tired of inviting him along soon if he kept refusing. The idea sounded not wholly unappealing, and for a moment he stood still while she headed into the trees, wondering if perhaps he'd rather head the exact opposite direction. But then she waved a hand at him, and there was something almost comforting in the annoyed way she tossed back, "Well? Coming?"

He followed along behind. The trail was too thin for two, or so he told himself. Really he'd rather not give Jane ample opportunity for eye contact. Best not make it even easier for her to accomplish whatever she intended by this.

"I was thinking," she started over her shoulder, "of offering to deliver the trade agreement for the king."

He should have known she wouldn't delay even a moment. "Were you now."

"Yes. I have never been to Loefbury."

He snorted. "What is there in Loefbury anyways?"

"A trade agreement. Or there will be by this time next week."

He almost didn't want to answer, but he'd followed her already, and if not for this, then why? "Really. You think the king would send his greatest asset for something so menial?"

Jane stopped and he almost slammed into her back. "Greatest asset?"

"I meant Dragon."

"Oh." She started forward again. "No, he would not come. A little threatening for a goodwill mission."

"I am surprised you would request anything that would require you to be away from him."

"Oh, pish. I am practically knighted, it is not as if he is some nursemaid I still cling to. Besides, this trip cannot be too menial if you deliver to the northern villages all the time. Has the king ever denied you any of those?"

Gunther scowled. That was different.

"And do not say that is different, because honestly—" she ducked beneath a low branch but caught her hair on its hooked twigs, which pulled it just far enough forward that when she jerked away the branch promptly thwacked back into Gunther's face.

Jane gasped and laughed in the same breath. "Oh sorry, I did not even—" she pulled a leaf from by his ear and laughed again. "You have a pink line on your cheek. Ow. Sorry." Her fingertip hovered as if she would maybe brush his stinging skin, and he watched it, and her, for a very long moment before she cleared her throat and fisted her hand at her side. "Would you want to come?"

"To Loefbury?"

She nodded.

He shrugged.

She kept walking. "Could be fun."

It really couldn't. It had little chance to be anything but boring. But perhaps he didn't really believe that — perhaps any trip with Jane had to be at least something. He pictured, out of nowhere, a dream he'd had recently. Jane had been reclined on a stone, unbound hair down to her waist, clad in a gold and green tunic. She hadn't been wearing much more than the tunic, and she'd been smiling, and reached a hand up to him — and then he'd realized the rock she laid upon was a gravestone.

He blinked away the dream, just as he'd shuddered awake from it a few weeks before. Jane glanced back at him, and he glanced away. They walked in silence for a few minutes. He was trying not to think of the curve of her neck when she went without armor, how it would be possible to trace the edge of her collarbones through the fine linen. He was trying not to think of her white as a bone laid out on a slab, her fingers char black, her lips coughed bloody.

She spoke again and he almost winced, pulled from his reverie.

"I heard you gave the outlying farms back to their tenants."

The path had room for two now. She was keeping pace with him. Her hand brushed his, and his twitched, but she was only swiping away a spiderweb, looking over at him. "And all the village pastures too."

"The agreements were all ash. What kind of claim did I hold without those?"

Jane's eyes narrowed. "A legal one. A burnt deed hardly reverts back a sale."

He turned his gaze to the uneven path ahead. "They belonged to the king anyways. My father was only managing them."

It was mostly true. They did belong to the king, for it was his kingdom, his land, his citizens — but Magnus had controlled the property and thus controlled its people, paper and coin and toil.

Jane sped up to match his stride. "Do not misunderstand me, I think you did the right thing — but you could have managed them just the same. Why give them up?"

"Because I have no idea how to run a business, Jane," he snapped, which was not at all true. He knew how Magnus had run it, and how he had expected Gunther to run it one day, and thus he knew exactly how _not_ to run a business. "How could I keep track of so many properties?"

"Your father did."

He stopped. Jane, a step behind, kept walking. She crashed into his back and he stumbled forward, prevented from falling only by her quick hand, which caught his wrist and yanked him to his feet, right back into her. Her fingers wrapped around his forearms, stabilizing the both of them, and she laughed, eyes alight. "See, the path _is_ rough!"

"You ran into me! The path has nothing to do with it!"

She kept laughing. For a moment he was caught up in it, her smile, the way the sound crackled through the air, how even the trees' shade couldn't dull her hair. Her thumbs pressed warm against his skin.

He shifted back. It was slight, but he felt it ripple through the space between them, the way her arms fell before she folded them against her chest. "Sorry," she said. And then, softer, "Sorry."

She wasn't just apologizing for smacking into him. He started walking again without even really meaning to, past her this time, back towards the castle. She didn't have to keep saying it, he thought, but said nothing.

She was quiet behind him. After a few moments, he heard her feet clack quick over the hard dirt, and then she was back at his side. For a couple minutes they walked together, and he had the impossible and contradictory wishes that it would be over already so he could leave her behind, and that the path would never end and they could walk forever.

"You have barely been rude since I have been back," Jane remarked when the canopy began to thin.

"Shall I start now?" he answered almost acidly.

She made as if to elbow him, but paused instead. They had reached the end of the trees.

"I should go," she said, sounding as if she wanted to and just needed the excuse of the word 'should'.

"Then go," he said. "Some of us have useful things to do."

She stared at him. It was strange and terrible for a second, her eyes sifting through him both gently and implacably, but it seemed important somehow that he hold her gaze. I feel fine, he thought at her forcefully, though the silent echo sounded desperate to his own ears. Really. Fine.

She turned. The sun bounced brightly off her curls, off her freckled skin. "Think about Loefbury, alright? And come to breakfast tomorrow," she said, her tone already admonishing because they both knew he wouldn't.

He said nothing, but she looked back at him over her shoulder anyways. This time he couldn't meet her eyes. Sometimes it was too obvious and too unspoken, what had happened, and how he had changed — and that she had noticed. Sometimes Jane noticing was the only thing that made it real.


	2. Magnus

Notes: Thank you so much for reviewing, it really means a lot! Glad to see there's still someone out there! We're hanging on lol. And I don't think I said before, but criticism is very welcome; I don't have a beta, so if you lovely folk notice something amiss please let me know!

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Chapter II.

Magnus.

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V.

Jane and Dragon had been a few months into their journey to search for other remaining dragons before Gunther had found the boy in the warehouse.

He'd heard a sickly little cough first. For a moment he'd simply listened, cocking an ear, his hand falling from the lock to his father's office and down to his dagger.

There it was again, quieter. Gunther took a deep breath and darted forward, pinning closed the thin gap between the stack of crates, blade at the ready. Though he could see a pair of eyes in the dim light, could hear a quiet gulp, he could see nothing else. He shifted a little so the lantern behind him shone through the dusty room.

It was a child. A boy no more than seven or eight. He trembled back against the wall, leaning away from the angled blade at throat's height, dirty from his bare feet up to his mud-colored hair. His breath hovered in the faintest whine through the silent room.

Gunther cleared the stagnant air from his throat and lowered his dagger a little. He was not used to pointing weapons at children. "What are you doing here?"

The boy's eyes didn't leave the knife's edge. "Not stealing nothing."

"Right," Gunther agreed, if only because the boy's clothes were threadbare enough to show there was nothing stashed in them. He saw then too a pile of blankets gathered between two boxes, straw sticking out haphazardly. These crates would ship out in the spring — likely no one had checked their contents for weeks at least. The crack between them was too small for an adult, though Gunther's arm fit through just fine. He let the dagger fall to his side, a bit ashamed he'd kept it up as long as he had. "Sleeping here, though, I wager?"

The boy leveled him with a wary gaze and said nothing.

"Is it that much warmer?" Gunther wondered.

The boy took a moment to respond. "Drier too."

Gunther frowned. When was the last time he'd slept outside without a tent in weather like this? Had he ever? "Where were you before? You must not have been here long, or someone would have noticed. Your family—"

The boy shook his head.

"No?" Gunther blew out a breath.

When Gunther was the boy's age, he imagined he would have tried to sneak him into the Breech Manor, with all its extra rooms and all sorts of pastries to be smuggled from the kitchen if one was only clever enough. When he was thirteen he would have reported the transgression directly to his father, desperate for anything that felt like loyalty, and begged him then to find a way to employ the boy, or to feed him at the very least.

Gunther was old enough now to know begging Magnus Breech for anything could only end in failure. Or worse — in lingering, tilted promises, lasting so miserably and so long that they never turned out to be worth it.

"No one at all?" Gunther asked, though he knew.

The boy shook his head again.

Gunther frowned harder. "Do you know whose warehouse this is?"

The light was enough to see the boy's face lose a little color. "Breech," the small voice muttered, when it became clear Gunther expected an answer.

Gunther winced. He hadn't meant to, but it happened anyways. "Yes," he said, unnecessarily. "My father's." He looked at the boy, but the boy was looking right back at him, and any stirrings of resolve swept themselves neatly away. "If he finds you here, you will not be so lucky."

(He'd meant it as a warning, but it felt like a threat.)

Still a spark came to the boy's eyes. "Lucky?" He looked inclined to test just how much so, as his teeth were peeking into almost a smile. The front two were missing.

"Yes," Gunther said firmly. "And if anyone else finds you, I will say I have never seen you a day in my life, and that you are in dire need of punishment." But even as he said it he sheathed his dagger and unwrapped his dinner from the bag at his hip. It was only a simple meat pie, but when Gunther passed it through the gap, the boy's eyes positively glowed. His fingernails were filthy. "Eat that slowly. If you cram it down all at once it will make you sick."

The boy let out a few vigorous nods and some much quieter thanks.

Gunther cleared his throat, as if he could possibly regain even a fraction of his familial dignity after this whole affair. "I want you gone before first planting—" more body-shaking nods, "—_and_ if I see a single sign of you in the warehouse before then, I will kick you out myself." (For your own good, he added in his head. Better him than his father.)

The boy's smile dimmed a little. He was cradling the pie against his heart. Still he nodded one last time. His 'yessir,' came out as a whisper.

Gunther gave a sharp nod back. "A deal then."

He pulled away. The boy inched over and the crates swallowed him again, the gap as innocuous as any of the others in the warehouse basement.

Gunther turned. There was the softest little sound, a 'thanks' he barely heard above the creak of his feet, but still he nearly smiled as he headed for the stairs. Foolish, yes, but right. Wasn't that always Jane's way?

His heart gave a hollow pang. She was over the ocean surely. Across the world.

She would like the story. The boy choosing here of all places, and Gunther responding in such a way — though of course he'd never tell it to her.

VI.

"Gunther."

"Hm."

"Are you falling asleep?"

"Mm."

"…Well?"

"No."

"Then why are your eyes closed?"

"They are not—"

"Well _now_ they are not. If you fall off your horse I am not helping you."

"Fine by me. Leave me to sleep in peace and quiet."

"In the middle of the road?"

"Yes. At least the dirt knows when to hold its tongue."

Jane rolled her eyes and nudged her horse ahead.

Gunther held back a yawn. He truly was trying to stay awake. He had no desire to slip like melted butter from his saddle, as he had seen Sir Ivon do a time or two when overindulged or underslept. It had been stupid to get so little rest the night before. He'd mostly believed Jane would be unable to convince the king and Sir Theodore to send them both to Loefbury, silly as it was, but somehow she had. They'd left a couple hours before, right as the sun clambered over the horizon.

He watched Jane's braid bounce for a few minutes before his eyelids started to dip again. But he wasn't falling asleep; it would be nearly impossible while trotting. (Besides, if he truly did fall from his horse, he'd never hear the end of it.) No, he was only resting his eyes — dozing at the very most. He could see the shape of Jane meld with that of her mare between blinks, smudging to a warm brown like polished wood.

The memory came dreamlike and strange, rolling in as transient as fog. His father was holding the box, the gleam of his many rings bouncing off the sheen of the wood. Gunther could only see a sliver through the cracked door, a man in patched clothes who gave something that looked nearly like a bow and then shuffled from the room.

The weighty silver ring round his father's thumb clacked against the box once, then again.

(The horses slowed once more to a walk.)

"It is beneath you to eavesdrop in your own home, Gunther."

Gunther gulped.

His father's voice sounded very soft and strangely mild. Didn't it usually sound more brusque than this? Now it was touched with a dreamy halo. "Come in, boy."

Gunther came in. If his father asked, he obeyed. But his father never asked anyways. He only told.

"See this," his father said. The box, he meant.

Gunther saw it. What he didn't see were its contents, and that was what he truly cared about. Knowing was half of having, after all.

His father lifted the lid. Inside were papers, and Gunther wilted a little in disappointment, for he'd pictured jewels, bars of silver and stacks of coins, judging by the sad set of the man's shoulders who had just left his father's office. Those were poorer shoulders than had entered the room.

"See this," his father said again. He carefully raised the top piece of parchment. "Right here."

Gunther could read, but the words meant little to him.

"This is the king's land, but the farmer promised to work it well and give the king his due in exchange for his tenancy. And yet the king has not paid me for months now. So until the king's balance is paid, the farmer will give me the king's due."

Gunther stared at the shaky scribble on the base of the parchment before him. He knew the farmer couldn't read or write.

"And he is far from the first." His father placed the parchment back in the box and set the lid on top. His voice was glowing, satisfied for once. "Boy, do you know what holds the most value of all I own?"

Gunther could barely count on one hand all the times throughout his childhood his father had reached for him gently. This was one of those moments, and Gunther nearly flinched as the broad fingers lifted his chin.

"Take a guess," Magnus said.

Gunther looked at his father's rings, then thought of the ship moored at the docks, then remembered, hazy and painful, the way his mother had smelled, expensive and spicy sweet. His father had brought her perfume from so far away Gunther could scarce imagine the distance.

His father patted the polished box.

Gunther frowned.

"Everything," his father said. "Every property the Breech family owns or manages."

Gunther stared at the box again. Everything.

His father folded his palms together. "And as they are mine, so they will be yours. This will be your responsibility one day — and not only managing, but leading. Soon enough I will find a way to get you a title and the deeds to go along with it." He paused. "The lord chamberlain has a daughter about your age. She could stand to inherit plenty."

Gunther felt his face scrunch. "I hate Lady Jane."

His father's grin grew wide and toothy. "Do not be so quick to hate those who are rungs to your success. You would never stoop to hate a ladder."

Gunther had kicked a ladder he'd tripped over in the courtyard only the week before, so he knew this wasn't true, but already his father had stood and pushed back from his desk. Gunther shrank aside to make room for him.

"You know where someone would come to steal from us."

It hadn't been a question. Gunther answered it after an unsure pause. "Here?"

Magnus nodded, sharp and short. "So where do you think I keep this box?"

Not here, Gunther wanted to say, but didn't dare, in case it was too flippant.

"The warehouse," his father said. "In a chest behind the office wall." He lifted a long chain from his neck where a small key dangled. "This is the only key. And one day, it will be yours."

Gunther's fingers twitched. Having was the best of all, of course.

"Gunther?"

His fingers twitched again on the reins. His horse was shifting beneath him, her walk growing more reluctant. His father's voice sounded muted and flimsy in his head. Gunther tried to remember how much of the scene was real and how much imagined, but could recall too well standing in Magnus's office, watching the key swing from his neck, to ever parse fiction from reality. Besides, he'd found that, replayed enough, the line between dream and memory grew much more indistinguishable.

"Shall we stop for water?" Jane suggested.

He shook the doze from his brain and patted his mare's neck. "Yes."

"Still with me?" she teased when they turned towards the nearby river. "I stayed close in case you slipped, but you never did."

"Finally growing a heart, Jane? I thought you said you would not help if I fell."

Her eyebrows rose. "Oh no, I planned to watch."

He almost wanted to laugh, or to throw something back, but could think of nothing.

Her eyes glinted. She resettled in her saddle, a little straighter than she'd been a moment ago. "Truly though, Gunther."

For a second he wondered if she would say what she'd hoped to say when she invited him for the walk earlier, what she'd hoped to accomplish with this whole pointless trip in general. He took in a breath. His thumbnail dug tight into the reins.

She grinned. "I am not without heart. I would have at least thrown a blanket over you."

His gathered breath turned to a snort, and he turned away, speeding to a trot, leaving Jane and her laughter behind.

VII.

Gunther's father had never hit him. Gunther knew that this was quite good indeed, but also knew that Jane had probably never even once noticed or marked that her own father didn't hit her, and the fact that he'd had the thought at all said nothing good.

Still, he was glad not to be hit. Magnus Breech hit other people, people who worked for him and made mistakes, which felt awful, but not as awful as if it were Gunther.

He could remember being six and watching his father's ringed hand soar over the face of the woman serving supper. The sound that accompanied it was strange and came somehow a second late, the smack of skin and maybe her teeth jarring against each other, her feet stumbling back over the floor.

Later that night Gunther cried into a pillow, from shock or fear or just from how his father had kept speaking right after, as if nothing had changed, and the same woman, come to bring something warm to drink before bed, rubbed Gunther's back and said nothing. She had the edges of jewels carved across her cheekbone.

He grew older. It kept happening. He knew he wanted to become a squire, and he knew what squires were supposed to do, and it wasn't nothing — and yet that was all he did, and so it kept hurting.

But (the thought wedged between his bones sick and horrible and relieved) not as much as it would hurt if it were him.

VIII.

He thought of it sometimes. Jane just returned, Jane holding his face, then her arms around him.

She had hugged him before she'd left, and it had felt so different, had really only meant something because they had perhaps never hugged before; they hadn't, because he would have remembered it. She had been as irritating as always, but there'd been a feeling in his lungs, a precognition of missing. Of the here-ness of her that soon would be there-ness.

He didn't hug her back the next time. He stood completely still as she trembled against him, her hair brushing his chin, splaying over his chest, as she said it once, and then again.

I am so sorry.

I am so sorry.

I'm not, he thought.

He had not thought that before. When everyone else apologized, he thought me too. I am sorry too.

But Jane was home and his father was dead and he was not so sorry as he should have been, or maybe he wasn't really sorry at all, and that was far more frightening than the piles of ledgers, than the owning everything, than the gravestone slab and the long hallways in a house that echoed and stretched and were empty without their master, for Gunther was not his father and never would be, never could be — thank God, he thought sometimes at that, standing in the hallway that connected his room and his father's. He filled the space so differently than Magnus did. Thank God.

When he'd started to shake, he knew Jane thought it was for a different reason than it really was, and so he pulled back, away, and Jane was left standing there, eyes wide and shiny wet, her arms open, loose, space for him that had never been there before, that he'd never realized how much he'd wanted. He pulled away further, and left that moment — left her standing there in that unbearable moment.

After that, she didn't touch him again.


	3. A Fire

Notes: Third chapter coming your way, halfway through! Reviews really make my life, if you have a moment it'd be rad if you left one, and if you already have, thank you I love you!

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Chapter III.

A Fire.

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IX.

"—Oh, it does! It stretches a fair ways. I will only be a short while; sometimes these old caves have dragon runes in them, I just want to check."

Gunther gave no answer. He was trying to remember the dream Jane had only halfway woken him from. It hadn't been a nightmare, but nothing good either. Muddied thoughts and images swirled sleepily around him. His bedroll was much more comfortable than his horse, who was snuffling at the moss against the cave walls, and the stone ground beneath was luckily only the slightest bit damp.

There had been stone around him in the dream, he was sure — but that meant little. There was always stone in his dreams. (How much longer they would have had if the warehouse had been stone instead of wood.)

And Jane. Jane had been there.

(That was also far more commonplace than he'd like.)

And she'd been standing below him for once, across and below…

On a ledge. She was on a ledge, and he's on a cliff facing her. He's fourteen all over again, with her trapped across the gaping chasm of a sheer drop, the stone unsteady and traced with faint patterns, break lines just waiting to give.

Go, she says.

There isn't time. They've stretched their arms as far as they will stretch, reached for each other as much as they can reach. She isn't getting over to this side. That much is clear.

He shakes his head. Somehow he knows the rock beneath him is steady still, even as he sits on the edge and dangles his sword belt for her to grab.

She doesn't even look at it. She's staring up at him. She isn't twelve, but she isn't seventeen either. He knows her face so well it doesn't matter that this is a Jane who exists outside time.

Take it, he growls, shaking the damn belt, swinging it closer to her.

I wish you were not the one here, she says instead.

The bitterness floods heavy and familiar through him. I am doing everything I can, he snarls. Tell me who could do more. We cannot all have wings, Jane—

She grimaces. Or maybe it's a smile; he's never seen her face quite like that, like her mouth and her eyes are having two different conversations. Her voice sounds as if it's coming from much closer than across a chasm. Are you dense on purpose?

He only stares.

Go, she says again. You have watched enough people die.

The stone cracks, peeling away in jagged sheets from beneath her, and he hears a loud clunk, and then her swearing.

"Nothing interesting, hang it all. But now I have a lovely bruise on my toe to remember this journey by. Oh — sorry, I should have been quieter. I did not realize you were sleeping."

Jane's horse whickered next to his ear. He frowned up at the rock above, the dream crumbling fast, already barely more than dust. "Well. Not anymore."

X.

It was cold the winter Jane was gone (though Gunther would not admit, even to himself, that it seemed colder somehow without her), and the warehouse office was small and dingy. Some evenings and Sundays, when the ledgers and shipment logs needed looking over, his father would send him instead. Before, Gunther used to sit there resigned, feeling wretched and chilly. It was a horrid windowless space, silent, candlelight catching on dust motes.

But it was silent no longer.

If no one was unloading, Gunther started with a gentle hum — very nearly casual, as if he didn't even notice he was doing it. And after the first couple notes dissipated, the whistling followed.

The first time Gunther heard it, he froze. The notes came soft and pure through the boxes, tiny and clear despite the musty dark building. For a minute he could only sit there listening, wondering at how the sound hung so delicately in the dry air.

Gunther couldn't help a grin when he realized what it was. The boy could whistle like a damned nightingale.

Soon enough he was repeating back anything Gunther hummed, and finishing whatever he started, even if it was some silly ditty Gunther had just come up with. He could imitate any bird, knew the popular ballads better than Jester did — and it wasn't a broken promise, was it, which Gunther liked perhaps best of all; he still couldn't see a single sign of the boy anywhere.

And where was the harm in it, if it made it so easy to scratch through the numbers? The minutes soared by. And if Gunther accidentally left behind the warm supper he'd brought himself, or some small coin fell from the desk and he couldn't be bothered to pick it up, where was the harm in that?

XI.

"I can make the fire."

Gunther reared back. Jane had stuck her hand out almost directly into his face (which, to be fair, was very close to the flint in his fingers), and he frowned up at her, a little insulted.

"No," he said. It seemed the easiest thing to say.

"I could use the practice," she said, her staunch cheer not dampened by his attitude. It had been almost two days now since they had left the castle for Loefbury, and she continually and without fail returned to good spirits no matter what he said. At this point it had to be intentional. "Dragon lit all our fires when we were away, I have not done it in ages."

He glared at her. "Practice. At starting a fire."

She nodded, looking a bit chastened but still unwilling to drop the act.

"And who has lit your fire since you have been home? Dragon passes a freshly charred torch through your window, does he?"

Her smile soured as surely as if there were a bad smell about. "It is too warm for room fires."

"And too bright for candles?"

She scowled at him.

He almost smiled at that, but hid it in his sleeve, scraping a spark into the tinder. "I think I can handle lighting a simple campfire, Jane."

"Of course," she said, after a beat. "Well." She sat and watched him finish. "If you ever tire of it, I do not mind."

Tire of it. She said things so carefully now. (What did she think he saw in the flames anyways? What did she want him to see? Oh yes Jane, how his inner demons writhed within every coal and ember, how every merry pop and crackle made his soft heart ache…)

His gaze flicked back up to her. He wanted to be angry, partially because he sort of was, and partially because it felt as if he had the right to be, but that melancholy look had returned to her brow and he found himself unable to say anything sharp. Instead he watched as she stretched out a hare they had caught earlier and began, with absentminded focus, to skin it.

"Do you think you and Dragon will travel again soon?"

Her head shot up. She was abruptly strangling the knife in her fist. "What?"

Gunther felt his eyes narrow. He didn't repeat himself, just stuck a thicker branch into the tiny fire.

"Travel. Hm," Jane answered, or rather, didn't answer. "Huh." She was making a face at the slip of bloody fur and the carcass that had looked like a rabbit only moments before.

"You liked it, right."

It wasn't a question, because he knew she had.

(How could he be so glad she was home and so ready for her to leave again? If it was anyone else, he wouldn't have bothered with conversation and just sat with the horses instead.)

"Yes," she started, then paused a little too long. "It was wonderful. But I thought—" she stopped again, threading a skewer through the thin animal. "That we would find something."

He didn't say he had known they wouldn't. He just looked back at the branches he was aimlessly shoving into the pit while she dug her skewer a small hole and pinned the hare at an angle over the flames. Then she pulled her knees up to her chest and leaned towards the fire. A summer breeze coasted over her hair, lifting a few pieces that had escaped from her braid, and she gave a slight shiver, setting her palms out towards the blaze. Gunther wasn't cold, but he moved closer as well.

"Or I suppose…" she began again. "I thought at least we would know something more."

She glanced at him for a half second, and he made the smallest noncommittal noise he could.

"Some hint. Anything. That somehow even though it turned out we were looking in the wrong places, we would know where to look next because of it." She paused. Reached out to the last branch he'd placed and tilted it into the base of the fire. "The world is a very large place."

It had been a hard last few months. He had lost, and Jane had looked and not found.

"You put too many in," she said, too soft to be a real reproach. She was rearranging the whole fire pit now, and far more thoughtfully than was necessary.

"Just wait," he answered. "They will catch."

She tucked her chin against her knees and continued to watch the flames, and he did the same.

XII.

Sir Theodore's had been the first face he recognized. There had been others he should have, people from the village, dockworkers he'd unloaded with, a sailor from his father's ship, but they reeled in his vision, alien and strange, as if ash were smeared over his irises, smoky patches waving over face and form until they were barely people at all, almost inhuman strangers, monsters who had seen the warehouse aflame and done nothing — had come only now to pick over the bones.

If I burn the town burns with me.

His grandfather had said that. He'd never been so organized or educated as Magnus, and his ledgers were almost diaries, numbers written in a way that Gunther had never been able to parse out into actual figures or transactions. The whole thing read almost as a list of exploits —accomplishments, Magnus would have said. The king-in-exile, King Caradoc's father, lived in the tunnels within the mountain cave, and Corrin Breech sold him and the usurping king-in-crown supplies from the same ship and the same cart, proud to have all the morals of a freshly hatched maggot, proud to be the only one with gold flowing between his fingers.

They had appealed to him to charge less. Then begged. Then threatened.

Corrin Breech had laughed. If I burn the king burns with me.

Then Sir Theodore had lead the king-in-exile from the tunnels, and the king-in-crown found himself without a head to wear his stolen crown upon. Sir Theodore became a hero, and Corrin Breech became the richest man in the kingdom, untouchable, the golden base upon which the castle was rebuilt.

Sir Theodore's hands squeezed life back into Gunther's shoulders. He could feel his knees on the hard dirt, the boy clutched against his chest, the skinny arms tangled around his neck. The child had stopped coughing a while ago, and Gunther only realized because there was just one cough now, and it was Gunther's.

Sir Theodore poured water down his throat. His abraded lungs finally quieted enough for him to hear the old knight saying something, something he couldn't understand. He only saw the mouth moving and the sounds, arranged like words and indecipherable as such.

Eventually they realigned themselves. The mouth fit the sound fit his ears.

Let go, Theodore was saying. Gunther, you must let go.

Let go of what?

But Theodore was pulling gently at his arms, at the arms folded around him, and was saying something else, voice low, and clear, and yet impossible for Gunther to follow, for his dazed head and raw heart and unsteady eyes to do anything but hold the boy closer, palms against the small back, the shoulder-blades bony and thin as a bird's, Theodore's hands pulling his away, shaking his shoulders.

Theodore said it over and over until Gunther finally heard.

Already dead. Gunther. Let go.

Gunther let go.

Behind him, the village was pouring bucket after bucket on the remains of the warehouse, not monsters at all, or strangers even, their hands moving water in lines to the flames spreading towards the docks and the housing district. The tendrils collapsed into steam and smoke, and then the smoldering wood extinguished — finally only the frame of the building remained, jutting like a broken black ribcage into the sky, and it was over.

Magnus Breech burned alone.


End file.
